TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox.

As the Palace Theatre house lights went down Saturday night and Tony Marino stepped into the spotlight, he sang, “I woke up from a curious dream.”

How dreamlike the day must have been as Marino and his Stage Right theater company sought to break the Guinness record for the fastest staging of a musical production.

Fourteen and a half hours after learning that “Children of Eden” was to be the production, Marino and a cast of 96 were onstage performing it.

“I’m incredibly proud of the entire company,” Marino said Sunday. “Any company that undertakes that kind of production in that amount of time … internally, everybody worked together so beautifully and everybody supported one another.”

Marino said the Greensburg community also was critical to the record-breaking attempt — 150 people volunteered during the day and 500 people turned out for the performance at 8 p.m. as the countdown clock wound down to 00:00.

“The whole community rallied behind this,” he said.

Marino said there were two points during the day —
10 a.m. and 5 p.m. — that he knew the theater company was on track. One was when he had finished blocking Act 1, and the other was after rehearsing the full show.

“I thought, ‘We have three hours to fix any problems,’ ” he said.

Marino, who played the part of Father/God, said he was pleased with the performance and praised the cast and chorus for being able to memorize their lines so quickly.

“When you’re in a show in any capacity, things stick in your head,” he said. “We’re lucky that it was a show like ‘Children of Eden.’ Shows that are well-written are just easier to put in your head and keep in your head.”

“Children of Eden,” by Stephen Schwartz and John Caird, weaves a singular narrative out of the biblical stories of creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah and the flood.

Most of the dialogue is sung by cast and chorus members who spend large amounts of time onstage.

Saturday night’s performance clocked in at just under three hours.

Among the chorus members was Emma Kate Angelo, 14, of Perryopolis, an eight-year Stage Right veteran.

“We’re really pushing it,” she said prior to Saturday night’s performance. “There’s not as much time for us to really develop a story, so we really have to stay focused on the story the whole time.”

Angelo said she’s used to rehearsing for three weeks before a performance — usually two hours a day.

Doing everything in 14½ hours was a stretch.

“We really have to stay focused and on-task at all times,” she said.

Avery Federico, 11, of Latrobe also was part of the chorus and spent most of the performance onstage.

“We’ve been working hard on all the choreography and all the words,” she said prior to showtime. “It’s just so much fun being part of it.”

The previous record

Stage Right was attempting to beat the previous record of 15 hours, set by the Sharpe Academy of Theatre Arts on Aug. 29, 2016, with a production of “Annie” at Watersmeet Theatre in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom.

Although Stage Right obtained the rights to “Children of Eden” ahead of time, no advance preparation was allowed.

The chosen production was revealed at 5:30 a.m. Saturday, at which point Stage Right officials immediately began working on set design.

“We literally drew it on a napkin at 5:45,” Marino said. By 1 p.m., the cast and ensemble were onstage rehearsing.

Nearly 100 people were involved with the actual performance onstage, not including the volunteers who served as timekeepers, witnesses, stagehands, costume and set designers, and orchestra members, said Tina Federico, Stage Right board president.

Marino said a package with documentary proof of the record-setting performance will be sent to Guinness in London this week. The theater company expects to receive confirmation within one to two weeks.

Proceeds from the show will go toward Stage Right’s summer camp scholarship fund.

Stephen Huba is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Stephen at 724-850-1280, [email protected] or via Twitter .

You are solely responsible for your comments and by using TribLive.com you agree to our
Terms of Service.

We moderate comments. Our goal is to provide substantive commentary for a general readership. By screening submissions, we provide a space where readers can share intelligent and informed commentary that enhances the quality of our news and information.

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderating decisions are subjective. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. Because of the volume of reader comments, we cannot review individual moderation decisions with readers.

We value thoughtful comments representing a range of views that make their point quickly and politely. We make an effort to protect discussions from repeated comments either by the same reader or different readers

We follow the same standards for taste as the daily newspaper. A few things we won't tolerate: personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, proselytizing and SHOUTING. Don't include URLs to Web sites.

We do not edit comments. They are either approved or deleted. We reserve the right to edit a comment that is quoted or excerpted in an article. In this case, we may fix spelling and punctuation.

We welcome strong opinions and criticism of our work, but we don't want comments to become bogged down with discussions of our policies and we will moderate accordingly.

We appreciate it when readers and people quoted in articles or blog posts point out errors of fact or emphasis and will investigate all assertions. But these suggestions should be sent
via e-mail. To avoid distracting other readers, we won't publish comments that suggest a correction. Instead, corrections will be made in a blog post or in an article.